


Barter System

by MonsterBrush



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, Chronic Pain, Gen, More characters to come, Temporary Character Death, enemies to friends???, i had ideas okay, idk why i'm doing this, improper use of beartraps, making art to cope, that's a long way off
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:02:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28033599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MonsterBrush/pseuds/MonsterBrush
Summary: Sometimes the killers have what the survivors need. Sometimes the survivors have what the killers need. Surely some sort of agreement can be arranged?
Comments: 26
Kudos: 65





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had ideas and decided to write them. Let's hope I keep this ball rolling somehow!

The estate was quiet. 

Evan MacMillan worked. He maintained the grounds. He manned the forge. He… drew, sometimes… And he tossed the drawings into the fireplace for the warmth. 

There would be more parchment. More charcoal. More fire. There always was. There was always more of everything. The mine never ran out of ore to smelt. The forest never ran out of trees to fell. Parchment was the only thing he was often left wanting, but it was a frivolous want. And what he couldn’t find? Well…  _ taking _ was always an option for Evan too. When he could. When he needed to. He cycled through his tasks without much thought to the order of things. Light the forge, heat the ore, smith the iron, set the traps, patrol the land. He would walk until his feet ached in his boots, and when he was finally done, he came back home to unwind.

He had another stack of parchment to feed the flames tonight, and he tossed them in one by one, piece by piece, until it was gone. Gone into the gaping maw of the hearth, the hot ash and smoke stinging his eyes. No more evidence of his idleness. Just a nice roaring flame. He held the edge of a page to the blazing heat and watched the dry parchment ignite. Flames quickly spread, consuming the face of someone he no longer recognized. A face twisted in fear, teeth bared in a frightened grimace, eyes wide, their hair matted with blood and sweat. He couldn’t remember when he drew it, or who they were, but he knew that he had killed them and he had allowed himself to forget. That was the only thing he could be certain of. 

The flames slowly reached his fingertips, burning sharply. He flicked the remaining corner of parchment into the hearth just as the heat became unbearable and reached for the next page in the stack. It was as much a ritual as the patrols he took through his territory now. When the crate was full, it was time to burn. He didn’t need the clutter. It wasted his time. 

Granted, some he kept. Out of some misguided sense of fondness, maybe. Sketches illustrating some triumph. Studies… Drawings he was particularly proud of… Those he placed in a separate crate. For safekeeping. That crate was due to be rifled through by now as well, to weed out anything now worth burning, but for now he worked on just the one. It burned time as well as paper, and when it finally sat empty Evan was feeling tense and restless, so he did what he always did when the knot in his stomach outweighed the ache in his arms and shoulders. He stood up and he went for a walk.

His territory was vast. Larger than some, he figured, based on the incomplete fragments he’d seen during his trials. Some trial grounds fit together like the pieces of broken dish ware, others sat removed, separate and lost. He’d never really seen the places the entity stole these replicas from, where people like himself no doubt languished similarly, waiting to be summoned. He used to wander, once. A long time ago. But not anymore. Things beyond his border didn’t interest him, and he had a property to protect after all. So he stayed, and he walked. He moved his traps. He checked for disturbances. 

Vermin snuck in occasionally. He knew it happened even if they managed to avoid his traps. He left certain things arranged  _ just so _ . A clump of grass. An arrangement of twigs. Someplace easily trodden, near traps bound to be found and avoided. He memorized the assortments, sketched them in his mind’s eye, and when he came back, sometimes he found they’d been moved by an ignorant foot. Sometimes there’d be tracks too fresh for the entity to have wiped away. And each time it happened he was filled with anger. It did not matter who they were. Whether they were the beasts the entity employed, or the meat they hunted, no one had the right to enter his land and leave without paying some toll, and blood was the preferred currency here.

Today things were quiet, which was how Evan liked it. Silent, peaceful, meditative. Meandering without thought, moving with his whims. Regularity was dangerous for tasks like this. It was important to trod irregularly, both to avoid his traps, and to prevent a recognizable pattern from forming out of his routine. Patterns could be memorized, planned against, used, and he would give no one the satisfaction of outwitting him. 

Still, it was odd how his constant rounds never seemed to wear a path, plants never wilted no matter how often he stamped them down, they always sprang back after a time. He knew he’d walked these lands enough for it, but it was beneficial that his stride never left its mark. It made trapping the grounds all the easier without a safe path for intruders to follow. He barely remembered a time when the world worked otherwise. That was so long ago now, he was sure. 

The abomination that lorded over him was strict. It kept him busy. Trials came and went, a welcome distraction at times, an infuriating disruption at others. But Evan excelled in them regardless. His performance was a point of pride now. He worked hard, and he got results. He earned his keep, proving his worth with each drop of blood he spilled. He earned the entity’s favor through grit and loyalty. He’d learned, through pain, what the consequences were for failure. He was still learning, evidently. The iron that pierced his charred flesh was proof of that, and he carried it like a badge. Disobedience was not tolerated from him. He was held to a high standard, and he intended to keep that standard. 

The muted snap of a beartrap echoed from somewhere near the Ironworks, jolting him from his daze. Evan recognized the sound and knew it hadn’t just shut on open air, and he heard the cry that followed, muffled by a hand in an attempt to keep quiet. It was close by.

One of the maggots had gotten it into their heads to pick at the bones of this place. To scavenge what was rightfully his. Anger boiled hot beneath his skin, chasing away his pains in the wake of this revelation. It came on quick and it came on hard, chasing away whatever thoughts he’d had a moment ago in favor of that cathartic mental burn. 

Evan turned towards the noise and started walking, brisk and purposeful, fingers clenched tight around the handle of his weapon, eager to put it to use. It had been a while since he’d last caught someone on his land, and it was about time he spilled some blood on it.

Before long he could see movement in the gloom, frantic, darting back and forth just outside the ironworks. More than one figure was creeping in the dark there. They’d come in as a group. The rage gave strength to his stride, they’d come as a group to rob him blind. A coordinated attack. Unforgivable. It was easy enough to chase away the wayward individual that came onto his land, but a group? That was bold. That warranted punishment. 

"TRAPPER!" One of the maggots shouted. Evan could see his grimy white shirt even at this distance. It was the boy with the glasses, sounding the alarm. A spot of pink entered Evan's line of sight. The redhead. The runner. He scowled as she came towards him, braids flying behind her.

"Come and get me, ugly!" She yelled, skidding to a stop a few yards away, ready to take off again. Playing bait. They'd come prepared, with a plan in mind, and it might have worked on a simpler man, but Evan was no such man. His scowl deepened as he kept walking towards the trap that had gone off. He could see them struggling with it in the grass now, and the runner's attempts to distract him grew more bold and frantic.

"No! Follow  _ me _ you asshole!" She came close enough for him to take a halfhearted swing, just enough to send her scampering back out of reach, but he kept walking, unyielding, unrelenting. He could see his prey clearly now. It was the black girl, with the glasses and dreadlocks, feeding the grass with her blood. She’d been after herbs, he figured. Herbs grown on his land. She had no right to them. The rage burned hotter. 

Beside her, another familiar face. One that sent even more fury spiking through Evan’s veins. The saboteur. He was crouched over the trap, tools in hand, trying to dismantle where it had shut on the girl’s leg. 

He knew these four. They’d been in the entity’s rotation of meat for a while now. Long enough that he could sketch each of their faces from memory. He didn’t know their names, though he’d heard them many times before, whispered, spoken, screamed. He didn’t need their names. They were prey. All of them. And his prey could not be allowed to escape.

Evan was not restricted to a slow, measured pace out here like he was during trials. And he was angry enough that he could ignore the agony of breaking into a sprint. The fire in his gut burned hot like the forge, he would not be stolen from. He broke into a run, barreling past the runner, who yelped in alarm at the sudden burst of speed.

“Jake, run!” the boy with glasses shouted. The saboteur scrambled out of reach without another glance, narrowly avoiding the sting of the cleaver as it swung towards him, and Evan let him run. 

He reached out and grabbed a fistful of the girl’s hair as he charged past, hauling her across the ground and ripping the trap free of the dirt it was tethered to. She screamed at the pull of the trap around her bloodied ankle, reaching up over her head to claw at his hand, but he barely felt it. Her nails were blunt, worn short from constant digging through mud and dirt, always in search of her useless scraps of weeds. Likewise, his skin was too callused for her to do anything other than irritate him. His grip was iron.

“Let her go!” the runner shouted. She was brave, he’d give her that. Always had been. But it was often her downfall, as it was now. She got too close, made to fight off the hand holding its prey, and he slashed at her with the cleaver for it. The back of the blade connected with the side of her head and she went down, leaving Evan to continue dragging his quarry through the dirt and the grass, a destination now in mind. 

The screams quickly turned to sobs, and her sobs turned to begging when he finally stopped and she saw what awaited her. 

A beartrap sat open and ready, jaws straining, the pressure plate waiting eagerly for something to trigger it. He’d hidden it in the grass not far from the trap she’d stumbled upon, but now he bent and ripped the spike fixing it to the hard packed dirt free and pushed it slowly out into the open with the side of his boot. He saw her companions collectively freeze where they’d scattered to in what limited peripheral vision the mask afforded him, and allowed a faint grin to grace his lips, if only for a moment. 

"Wait, wait, wait!!!" It was the boy with the glasses. He ran forward, arms up, hands empty, a desperate look on his face. Evan didn't move, and he took that as a chance to go on. "Please, we can talk about this! We can negotiate," he said, his voice shaking. This wasn’t the first time the meat has tried to talk their way out. This boy tried it more often than most, so it didn’t surprise Evan that he would be the one to try this now. Nonetheless, Evan was curious to hear what he would say next.

“We–we can…” he trailed off uncertainly and Evan couldn’t help but be disappointed. He shook the girl over the trap in warning, making her gasp and choke back a sob, clutching at his hand tighter in an attempt to lessen the no doubt agonizing pull of her hair. The boy in the glasses seemed to balk at this, like Evan thought he might. 

"Please, we'll leave, we can leave! You don’t have to do this," the girl over the trap whimpered, trying to dig her good foot into the ground for traction, but too frightened to really struggle now, lest it cause his grip to fail.

Evan felt a hot flash of anger at her words, a low growl escaping him. What else would it take to keep them from wandering where they didn’t belong? Sticking their noses into business that didn’t concern them. Sneaking onto  _ his _ land, disarming  _ his  _ traps, taking  _ his _ things. He held her further over the trap’s waiting jaws, that rage burning its way through him, like fire traveled along a fuse. An example had to be made. No one steals from him. Not even a lowly maggot. They would remember their place, and they wouldn't soon forget it.

"We'll trade you!" The boy with the glasses shouted suddenly, just as Evan was considering finally letting her go, and Evan paused, tilting his head to show he was listening. Evan could see the sweat beading on his brow from where he stood, and hear the tremble in his voice. "We'll trade you… whatever we have." He patted down his shirt and pockets, making a show of searching for something to trade, hands shaking, but Evan already knew he had nothing to give him. Nothing worth what was being traded. Behind him, the runner was also checking her person for something to offer. The saboteur wisely kept himself out of it. It was for the best, all that he would likely find in those pockets were tools. Granted, tools were better than the scrap he was being presented with.

A depleted roll of gauze, the key to a hatch, a crumpled handful of… papers. Evan cocked his head again, unimpressed. He could see a fresh wave of sweat breaking out over their skin. 

The grip he had on the girl's hair and the strain of holding her body aloft pulled at the metal spikes embedded in his forearm. Even with the supernatural strength bestowed upon him by the entity, his arm was beginning to shake, fresh blood welling from around where the iron protruded from his skin. Prolonging the inevitable was becoming tedious. He'd already made up his mind. So...

He dropped her.

Her face hit the plate before she could catch herself and the brutal  _ snap _ of the beartrap was interrupted by the crack her skull made between its jaws. The body spasmed for a moment, her sudden scream ending in a gurgle as the brain's protective shell was crushed from either side, penetrated by the trap's sharpened teeth. The whole thing was over in an instant. If nothing else, it had been a quick death. A mercy Evan granted only in his impatience. There was silence for a moment, and then--

"YOU SON OF A BITCH!" The runner bolted forwards, bearing down on him with a repurposed length of scrap metal. There wasn’t a proper place to grip the thing, it was awkward and unwieldy and her swing was doomed from the start, but she tried it anyway, committed to the motion. Evan caught her attack on the flat of his blade, deflecting the blow before raising one steady foot to kick her away. 

Her own momentum did most of the work for him. She collided with his boot at an impressive speed given how short a distance she'd just closed, making his kick all the stronger. He caught her in the chest, so when she was sent sprawling she clawed her way up coughing. 

" _ Bastard _ ," she wheezed, defiant even as she saw him ready his cleaver for blood, bringing his boot down hard on her gut to keep her in place. 

Something small impacted the side of his mask. A rock. He jerked his head to one side, seeing the boy with glasses, legs trembling as he readied another stone. As always, it was too little too late. Before he could let another rock fly Evan swung his cleaver and carved a brutal canyon into the runner’s throat, feeling the blade hit bone. He’d cut through to the spine. She gurgled and choked, dead within seconds, still trying to spit profanities but only managing blood.

When Evan turned back to the boy with the glasses, he’d already ran, the dingy white of his shirt disappearing into the fog at the edge of his estate. Coward. The next trial he got with that boy would be a brutal one, he decided. The saboteur was next, but he too had made a wise retreat into the woods, abandoning his tools in the process. 

The ironworks were finally quiet. Evan's heart was thudding in his ears as he sucked in deep heavy breaths. His body was hot, burning with rage. He felt the entity groan, the very air flexing around him, an unseen pressure imperceptibly pressing upon the very world itself. At his feet, the corpses began to crumble away, breaking down to be rebuilt somewhere else. He didn’t know where it took them when they died outside the trials, but what it did with them was its business, not his. All that mattered to Evan was that he wasn’t punished for it. 

The entity never faulted him for enforcing his territory, but it never closed him off completely either. It let them come, it left them salvage to find, it gave them hope. Evan knew those electric torches weren’t meant for him. The batteries. The gauze. He took it anyway. Anything on this land belonged to him. And those vultures crept in to steal from him whenever they could. Always after what he had. Never leaving him to his own. He wouldn’t give up what was his. Not if he could help it.

His temper gradually cooled. He stooped to collect the two traps that had been triggered, still dripping with fresh blood. The blood was always last to disappear, if the entity saw fit to take it at all. The traps needed to be set somewhere new. 

The world seemed to sigh as the entity relaxed and Evan relaxed with it, a cold breeze rolling over the barren landscape to sting Evan’s skin. It almost seemed to Evan that even his agonies were soothed by the Entity’s presence, the ever-present throbs of pain lessening in the wake of the adrenaline fueled rush of bloodlust he’d just experienced. It was a familiar sensation, one he felt after each successful trial, reward for a job well done he’d always suspected. A hot numbness settled over him, disguising his pain, and he was content to ride it for as long as it would carry him. It would make the walk back to the estate far more pleasant. 

As he turned to go, there was a flutter of movement at his feet, and Evan glanced down to see a scrap of wrinkled paper caught in the grass, dropped by one of the maggots. He bent to collect it. It was crumpled, flecked in blood, but blank, and Evan smiled, smoothing it out and tucking it away. This wasn’t a complete waste of his time.

If he was lucky, he might even be able to manage a light nap before the pain returned. 


	2. Chapter 2

Jake had protested against bringing the others with him. There was danger in numbers on the Trapper’s territory. The bigger the group, the more likely it was that someone would blunder into one of his traps. And the more people Jake had to keep his eye on. Eyes better suited to scavenging and watching for danger. 

But they needed the supplies, and he didn’t know the herbs like Claudette did. But then Meg offered to come, treated it like one of her jogs, excited to go, even, and if Claudette and Meg were going, Dwight decided he wanted to come too, and suddenly what should have been a quick in-and-out solo mission had become a group affair. 

“The whole gang, back together,” Dwight had said. “We haven’t hung out just the four of us in a while, you know?” 

This wasn’t ‘hanging out’, Jake resisted the urge to say, frustrated and annoyed. This was serious. This wasn’t a game, no matter how hard Meg sometimes tried to convince herself otherwise. Sure, maybe he was just moody that his treasured alone time was being invaded, so he kept his mouth shut. Dwight knew better than anyone how serious this place was. He was scared, Jake could see it in his eyes, he rarely ever left the safety of the fire, but he wanted to come anyway. Dwight was always scared, but he just wanted to help.

So, Jake let them come. Even though he was fairly sure he'd end up regretting it. And he was right. 

But when Claudette had gotten trapped, Jake didn’t feel annoyed, he felt horrified. He’d turned and saw her knelt in a patch of greenery, tears in her eyes, both hands clamped over her mouth, but her scream had been muffled too late. It rang in his ears and seemed to echo in the silent landscape around them. There was no way the Trapper didn’t hear it. All they could do was hope he was far enough away that they had time to free her and leave.

Jake and Meg rushed to help, reaching for the trap together to pry it open as Dwight crept onward, his head on a swivel, wide eyes searching for movement. The teeth dug into Jake’s fingers, threatening to slice them open and beside him he heard Meg swear under her breath when the trap refused to budge. 

“I’m sorry guys, I’m so sorry, I’m such an _idiot_ ,” Claudette was sobbing softly.

“Don’t say that, Claud, it’s going to be okay,” Meg whispered. “Jake, use your tools,” she added, still wrestling with the jaws, and Jake fumbled for his toolkit. 

“TRAPPER!” Dwight yelled, and Jake’s blood ran cold. He’d found them so fast, he must have been nearby. They were out of time. 

“Keep trying,” Meg hissed to him, pushing herself to her feet and running towards Dwight, past him, deeper into the Trapper’s territory. Jake didn’t bother looking to see which direction the Trapper was coming from, there was no time to waste now. He knew what Meg was doing, he just had to hope she was successful.

Claudette was shaking hard as he fought with the spring that held the jaws of the trap closed, huffing in frustration when it held firm. He heard Meg taunting the Trapper in the distance, heard her shout in dismay when her attempts to catch his attention failed. 

The rapid stomp of heavy boots surprised him, and Dwight gave Jake just enough of a warning for him to launch himself backwards away from Claudette and scramble to safety. He felt something whizz past his head, brushing his hair, and he kept going, trying to put some distance between himself and the Trapper. Claudette screamed, and Jake turned just in time to see her being dragged across the ground by her hair.

A flash of helpless rage burned in Jake’s stomach then, his throat tight as he watched the Trapper make his way across the clearing at a slow leisurely pace, taking his time, but walking with a purpose. And Jake's stomach lurched when he found out what he was headed for. 

With a horrible measured slowness, the Trapper dragged the beartrap where they all could see it. He straightened next, and held Claudette perilously over the menacing jaws, the dark pinhole eyes of his stark white mask fixing them collectively with the weight of the stare he was no doubt leveling on them. He wanted them to watch this. He wanted them to see what was about to happen to her. 

Dwight caved almost immediately, doing what he always did when there was no way out. Talk. Maybe he still thought it would work, maybe it was just a reflex now, Jake couldn’t know for sure, but it was better than nothing.

“Wait, wait, wait!!! Please, we can talk about this! We can negotiate!” He shouted, desperate, panicked, and Jake knew Dwight had no idea what to do next because he hadn’t expected the Trapper to comply, and neither did Jake. He didn’t drop Claudette. Not yet. In fact, maybe it was Jake’s imagination but he thought he saw the Trapper’s arm relax minutely. He was listening maybe. It was always difficult to tell—probably by design—when a killer was actually hearing what you were saying, listening and comprehending it. But he stood very still, his horrid grinning mask fixed dangerously on Dwight.

Dwight was struggling to find his voice, Jake could see it even with his back to him he knew Dwight was mouthing nonsense, trying to summon the words. 

“We–we can…” Dwight trailed off and the Trapper shook Claudette roughly by the hair, startling a fresh bout of sobs from her. Jake heard her begging softly between tears and felt utterly helpless. 

It was a threat. ‘Talk, or I’ll drop her’, the Trapper was saying. Amazing how much could be conveyed with so little. Jake could almost respect that. His own distrustful silent treatment when he’d first come here hadn’t lasted long with the other survivors. 

“We’ll trade you! We’ll trade you… whatever we have!” 

The man tilted his head, slow and eerie, the way some killers did when they were examining one of them, a movement that felt like it was deliberately engineered to disturb them. Was this working? Jake didn’t dare hope. Dwight had tried this song and dance before, in trials. The killers never listened to them during trials. Never. Killing took precedence for most, if not all, killers. 

But to Jake's shock, he saw the Trapper seem to listen as the meager supplies they had in their pockets were gathered and presented. But it wasn’t enough, not even close to being enough. The Trapper was never going to trade a potential kill for a handful of rubbish, not even outside a trial. A pile of garbage just wasn’t worth letting Claudette go. They’d missed the mark.

Some days were like this. Days when even the best plans fell apart for no reason other than bad luck. Days when no matter what they tried, things just didn’t work out. Sometimes Jake suspected the entity had something to do with it. Today, he was willing to bet it was all the Trapper’s doing. 

It happened so fast. The Trapper's hand released Claudette and she hit the ground a moment later. Jake shut his eyes but it was too late. The image of Claudette's body shaking as she died, her head crushed by a beartrap, was burned into his mind. 

"YOU SON OF A BITCH!" Meg screamed, her voice a wreck of rage and misery. There was no point in trying to fight, the Trapper was in a whole other league, but Meg swung at him anyway. Jake barely saw what Meg grabbed as a weapon, something she’d ripped up out of the dirt and grass, a length of iron, but it didn’t matter. The Trapper batted her away like it was nothing, like _she_ was nothing, and advanced on her now, the new target of his apparent ire. 

To his credit, Dwight did more than Jake expected of him. But the rock he'd thrown was about as effective as Meg's earlier shouts had been at deterring the Trapper. This time, Jake had the time to turn away. Meg was a goner. She had been the minute she'd refused to run. He heard the impact of the cleaver, assumed he’d gone for the throat, and decided it wasn’t worth sticking around any longer. So Jake turned and ran, knowing Dwight was sure to follow suit. He ran, and he kept running until he had reached the edge of the Trapper’s territory. 

Once he was confident in how far he’d gone, Jake skidded to a stop just before the line of trees. He ducked behind a patch of shrubbery and peering through the leaves back in the direction of the ironworks. He was safe, the Trapper wasn’t giving chase. He stood watching the direction they’d gone, unmoving. 

Jake let out the breath he’d been holding, long and slow. A few yards away, he glimpsed Dwight sneaking over, stopping every few feet to check over his shoulder, wary of being spotted. Jake could appreciate the abundance of caution. 

“That could have gone better,” Dwight tried sheepishly as soon as he came close, looking distraught but trying to hide it. His eyes were wide and glistening behind his glasses and his chest was heaving. Jake nodded silently, directing his attention back to the clearing. Claudette and Meg’s bodies were disappearing, and the Trapper’s shoulders sagged as he bent to collect his traps. A moment later, he bent again to collect something else. One of the scraps of paper they'd tried to offer. Why he wanted to take it was beyond Jake. They collected the paper for Jeff and Nea to draw on, when the mood struck them, or for Claudette to "blog" as Meg called it. 

Jake watched the man’s hulking silhouette until it faded into the distance, listening to the confident stomp of his heavy boots slowly ebb away. He was headed past the ironworks, to the estate maybe. 

“Let’s get back to the fire,” Dwight said weakly, sounding thoroughly beaten, and Jake shook his head.

“He left my tools.” He pointed to the patch of grass where Claudette had gotten trapped. The tools were still sitting there, forgotten. He’d had to leave them behind when he was chased off initially, and the Trapper hadn’t bothered to take them afterwards. Jake wasn’t about to lose them if he could help it. 

“Right, get them fast, we should go,” Dwight was already turning back in the direction of the forest, ready to leave, but Jake shook his head again. 

“I’m not wasting the trip, you go on. I’m going to see what I can still find,” Jake told him. “Head back without me. Claudette will worry if we aren’t back soon.”

Dwight couldn’t argue that point. Claudette _would_ worry, and after what just happened to them she wouldn't want to be leaving the campfire any time soon. Dwight gnawed at his lip, looking over the bushes in the direction the Trapper had gone. Everything was quiet. 

“Alright, but be careful. Please.”

Jake nodded, watching the direction the Trapper had gone for a moment longer before sneaking from behind the cover of the bushes and back out into the open. He made a beeline for the tools, alternating swiftly between checking his surroundings and checking the ground. He was a pro at this by now, with how often he scavenged the other realms in this place. 

The Trapper’s turf was always a risky gambit, his routine was never something to rely on. Without a way to track the passage of time there was no way to find a pattern in his movements, and with the random trials, things were even more uncertain, but so long as you kept your feet out of his traps you had a high chance of getting in and out alive and hopefully undiscovered. Today they’d been unlucky. What had happened to Claudette? That was new. But it wasn’t the first time a killer had ever gotten creative. 

The grass was still wet with Claudette’s blood when he reached it, and Jake shuddered as he picked the tools from the puddle it made. They’d be tacky and disgusting, but still well worth pocketing. It wasn’t as though his pockets hadn't ever been soaked in blood before. 

He recognized some of the plants Claudette had been digging for too, so he uprooted a few of the ones he knew, pocketing them carefully. He wasn’t as delicate with them as Claudette would have been, but even if they didn’t survive the trip back to be replanted, she could still use them as salve. 

There was no point sticking around in the open so Jake crept to the ironworks next, watching the ground. If he was lucky he could find a tool or two tucked away somewhere amid the old machinery. As decrepit as the place looked, Jake knew it was still operational. 

There were times when Jake could hear the metallic clang of metal being beaten and forged, or see smoke rising from the chimneys of the ironworks. It was always the best time to snoop around, because Jake could hear whether the Trapper was occupied, and could hide if he heard the hammering stop. Once, Jake even stepped in a trap while the Trapper was working, and the noise had lined up perfectly with the impact of metal, disguising the snap. 

Whatever tools the Trapper used for this trade, Jake never saw them. Not that Jake would know what to do with metalworking tools, but they were bound to be useful regardless. The Trapper must lock them away somewhere, or bring them with him when he leaves, Jake figured, but he’d never been able to get past any of the locks he came across. All he could find now was the occasional chunk of raw ore, or scrap of discarded iron, but the ore was useless to Jake and the scrap pile yielded very little that he could actually use. The scraps usually had potential. Sometimes Jake could find something that was _almost_ serviceable as a shiv. Laurie was always looking for sharp things to use in trials, but he couldn’t find anything promising today. 

Sighing, Jake sat back on his heels and scanned his surroundings again, hoping to maybe spot something he’d missed during his first comb of the place. Nope. Still nothing good. He could try and mess with the lock on the door he suspected led to the workshop where the Trapper kept his tools, but that never got him anywhere. He didn’t have anything he could use to pick the lock, and he’d tried it on multiple occasions to no avail. 

The warehouse was next. Jake could see its silhouette from the ironworks. He had the time. He’d go through every structure, scouring the entire territory for anything worth taking like he’d wanted to before “the gang” decided to join him. And his standards were getting lower. He found some gauze tucked away. The crates still held iron ingots, the ones Jake could open, but he had no use for them. He doubted anyone here could use them except for the Trapper. You’d need a forge, tools, and the know-how to put it all together. And as far as Jake could tell, the Trapper was the only one here who had all three. 

What Jake wouldn’t give for that kind of skill set. He’d learned everything he knew about survival from books and the internet. His formal education hadn’t exactly included things like how to start friction fires or build a shelter in the forest, but being able to craft and build? Creating practical things from scratch? Things he could use to not only survive but thrive? God, Jake wished he'd learned that sort of thing. 

The coal tower was a similarly disappointing search, but Jake pocketed a few lumps of coal anyway. Sometimes it was interesting to light them with the campfire, to see something burning that wasn’t a set of logs that never went out, or an offering that disappeared almost immediately, and if it killed a few minutes of boredom, well then it was better than nothing.

He could try the estate next, Jake figured, standing up with a huff and stretching his cramped legs. The constant vigilance was tiresome. It made him stiff and sore, it wore him down, but it was something to do other than wallow around the fire or walk through the woods, mortal peril aside. 

The estate was risky, but for whatever reason there was almost always something Jake could find there. Maybe it was the Entity giving them excuses to get killed, Jake wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case. But if he could get his hands on something, _anything_ , it would make this trip at least somewhat worth the risk he was taking by sneaking so close to where the Trapper was almost certainly at. Maybe even worth what had happened to Meg and Claudette.

Jake moved slowly and carefully. There was no guarantee that the Trapper had stopped patrolling, and if he got caught, he was dead. Maybe like what had happened to Meg and Claudette, maybe something worse. Granted it wasn’t permanent but… 

It wasn’t pleasant. And despite the comfort knowing that he’d just be put back where he was supposed to be, it never got easier. It still hurt, and dying out here was worse than dying in a trial. 

Out here, the killers could be creative. They could kill you however they wanted, and they could take as long as they wanted. All the survivors had stories by now. All of them taught the newcomers which killers to avoid being caught by at all cost. Which killers liked to take their time, the ones that liked to do the worst things. The Trapper wasn’t so bad compared to some of the others. Sure, his traps were no picnic, they hurt like a bitch and sometimes he’d leave you in them for ages, just watching you struggle, knowing that even if you got out you still wouldn’t be able to get away. But he killed quickly once he got bored. Even with his grudge towards Jake for breaking apart his traps, he usually killed fast. Brutal, angry, but fast.

The estate was even more heavily guarded than the ironworks. There certainly wasn’t a limit to how many traps the Trapper could use outside the trials, and he used them all. Well, almost all of them. Jake glimpsed a pair of traps on the front porch by the door glistening red with blood as he approached. 

Claudette’s blood.

The Trapper must have dropped them off at the door when he went inside. 

The estate, a big two story home with a classy wrap-around porch, was the crown jewel of this place. Or, maybe it was, once, back in its prime. Now though it was as much of a ruin as anywhere else. A relic from another time. Old fashioned, dark, quiet. Jake had never been inside, but he was willing to bet there was plenty of good salvage to find in there. It was where the man _lived_ , he probably kept all sorts of good stuff inside. He’d seen the Trapper bring things in with him once or twice, bags that rattled and clanked, tool kits, med kits… Jake tried to sneak in once, while the Trapper was out, and he knew he wasn’t the only one who’d ever tried it either, but the doors and windows were always locked tight and he’d barely made it to the front porch without being caught in the traps. 

Jake could see firelight flickering in the windows now and knew the Trapper was inside. He crept closer, ducking underneath windows, stepping softly and carefully through the grass, knowing for a fact there were traps hidden all around the perimeter of the house. 

Sneaking up towards the nearest windowsill, Jake narrowly avoided stepping squarely in a fresh beartrap set exactly where he’d meant to put his foot. Probably meant to deter people aiming to do exactly what Jake was doing now. That the Trapper liked privacy didn’t surprise him much. But that didn’t mean Jake was going to give him that luxury. 

The glass was thick with grime, and he had to peer through a set of shutters, but Jake could make out where the fire flickered in the hearth, casting its orange glow over the rest of the room. A wooden crate sat not far from it, and resting on top of it was a pair of boots, connected to a pair of legs, leading up to… and it was there that Jake froze. 

The Trapper was sat in an armchair with his boots propped up by the fire, massive shoulders rising and falling rhythmically, the spikes of metal protruding from his skin glinting dully with every breath. An empty hand hung over the side of the armchair, relaxed and motionless. 

The Trapper was sleeping. 

Jake could just barely see the contours of a bare face turned away from him in the dim light of the fire. 

It wasn’t every day Jake was privy to seeing a killer that wasn’t actively hunting or being a general threat, and Jake had been snooping around the fog for a long time now. He’d seen almost every killer “In their natural habitat” as Meg liked to say. All of them save for the Wraith, whom he’d never managed to spot no matter how many trips he took to the wreckage yard or the auto shop they suspected he roamed. He’d seen the Trapper plenty of times, busied with work Jake didn’t understand. This was the first time he’d ever seen the Trapper _sleeping_ before. He hadn’t known killers _could_ sleep, but this was certainly evidence to the contrary. So long as he was quiet, he was almost safe right now. 

Jake frowned, thinking hard, debating with himself.

Was he willing to take a risk today, after what happened to Claudette? What’s the worst that could happen, he’d die? 

Ha. That was rich.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It feels a little bit like a cop-out, writing a chapter about what just happened from another perspective, but Jake had some things to say. I hope to have the next chapter out soon if I can. We shall see.


	3. Chapter 3

“ _Urgh_ , I _hate_ him!” Meg snarled, pitching a rock into the dark woods surrounding the campfire with surprising strength. Still fuming over what had happened with Claudette, Dwight figured. She’d gone on a jog to cool off but came back angry anyway, so she was pacing now, stomping back and forth across the clearing, kicking up dead leaves and twigs occasionally. 

Claudette was still shivering under Adam's arm where the two sat near the fire. She’d been crying when she came back, from shock mostly, Dwight hoped. It always shook them when they died outside a trial, and it had hit Claudette hard this time. No one faulted her for it, it wasn’t the first time anyone ever needed to cry their eyes out. Dwight had done it himself plenty of times now. He didn’t feel ashamed of it anymore. 

No one was surprised to hear that Jake opted to stay behind and continue scavenging. Jake was always the first person to suggest splitting up, going solo, heading out alone. He valued his privacy perhaps more than any other survivor. He liked going out alone. He reminded Dwight of his mother’s cat. Technically a stray, but his mother fed it every day. It came when it wanted to, and left when it got sick of them. That was Jake. 

“Think we should pop over, show that great big bastard what happens when he messes with us?” David asked, cracking his knuckles dramatically for good measure. He’d been out for blood the moment Claudette had returned to the fire. Dwight jumped in with his own input before Meg could agree to do anything stupid.

“You’re just going to make things worse for us in the trials. The Trapper will hold a grudge,” he said, and rightfully so. He had a bad feeling in his gut already, and as often as that happened, his overactive stomach was usually right. They’d clearly caught the Trapper in a foul mood, but when were killers ever in good moods really? The next trial they had with him was going to be a bad one, Dwight could feel it. The Trapper always retaliated ruthlessly to any sort of break from the status quo. Like he was punishing them for it. It fed into the question they’d all pondered, what the killers were exactly. Puppets? Prisoners? Murderous servants of the eldritch abomination in the sky? Dwight still wasn’t sure which he believed yet. 

“There’s more of us than there are of them! We could get ‘im if we all went together,” David was arguing, crossing his arms. “The bastard deserves it for what he did to Claud.”

If Tapp had been here, Dwight had no doubt he'd agree with David, granted he might have had an _actual_ plan. As luck would have it, Tapp was in a trial, so Dwight had time to dissuade David from his spectacularly foolish idea.

"You remember what happened last time you did this," Dwight pointed out grimly. The rest of that recollection didn’t need to be said, David knew what Dwight was referring to and he scowled across the campfire for it. It hadn’t gone well, what had happened last time. The Doctor loved their visits.

Even outside the trials, without the rules that restricted them all, the killers were supernaturally strong. David readily admitted to a rough life spent brawling before he’d been taken, which Dwight wholeheartedly believed, and even he had trouble stacking against a killer in a fight. Not that he didn’t try his damnedest anyway. He took swings on reflex, his fight-or-flight was biased towards fight. He’d swung on killers inside trials and out, and he’d bleed for each and every blow he landed. It never stopped him. He was braver than Dwight ever hoped to be, but he was also kind of foolish, Dwight thought.

“That was a long time ago. There’s more of us now,” he repeated stubbornly, jabbing the fire with a stick.

“Can’t be worse than talking and hoping those monsters listen, when has _that_ ever worked?” Meg huffed, dropping onto one of the logs around the fire at last. She was silent for a moment, then smirked, “You should have offered to blow him. Bet that would have worked.” 

David barked out a laugh and Dwight wrinkled his nose in disgust. Ace sat nearby, ignoring them in favor of playing solitaire with himself on the dirt with the pack of cards that had been in his pocket the day he was taken. His usual partners in crime, the ones willing to play with him and satisfy his gambling “hobby” were either in a trial or out in the woods, making use of what little privacy the surrounding trees offered them. But he laughed then, looking up from his game long enough to give Meg a smirk, amused. 

“Meg, please,” Adam murmured, appalled. 

“Sorry,” Meg said, looking decidedly unapologetic. “I’m just saying, talking clearly doesn’t work. Not with him.”

"What _did_ happen anyway? I still don't understand," Adam said, confused.

"Dwight tried to trade the Trapper a bunch of garbage for Claudette and he thinks it almost worked," Nea butted in from the treeline, having overheard it all from the beginning. Dwight wanted to mention he'd never said he thought it almost worked, but it wasn't worth the conflict. "Find anything good out there?" 

"Oh yeah, I found a piece of paper for you, hang on." Meg went for the pockets of her running shorts then froze, frowning.

"Trapper took it after he, uh..." Dwight trailed off with a sympathetic cringe. Meg let out another frustrated snarl of annoyance, tossing her hands in the air. It had been Nea's turn for paper.

"Greedy bastard." Nea scowled, sitting on the log beside Meg, giving her a bump with her shoulder. "Thanks for trying though. Would have probably given it to Claudette anyway, she needs it more than I do." 

Being killed outside of a trial always felt different compared to deaths during trials. During a trial, you already knew you’d be headed back to the campfire one way or another. You could get hooked, you could get mori’ed, you could escape through the gates, or you could use the hatch. You _knew_ what would happen. Outside of trials, you never knew much of anything. There were no rules. Death felt… real, out here. It was one of the reasons Dwight hated to leave the fire. He didn’t understand people like Jake or Nea who liked to roam and explore. It went beyond necessity for them. They tempted fate. They took risks. Nea delighted in pissing off the killers when she left the fire, and Dwight knew for a fact Jake sometimes went out of his way to spite them too. 

They weren’t alone in their habit of being difficult. Meg’s jogs sometimes wove through the killers’ territories, too fast for them to catch, unrestricted by the trail’s limitations. And David wasn’t much better. He died almost every single time he left the fire. Because when he left, it was usually because he was out for blood, and regardless of how the fighting went, David always came back the quickest route… Dwight might never understand the things some of his fellow survivors did.

“Jake’s been gone a long time,” Dwight pointed out during a lull in conversation, trying not to sound concerned. 

“No he hasn’t. He knows what he’s doing. He’s not an idiot,” Nea said. Of course she wasn’t worried. Nea was tough, like Jake. Independent. Strong. She left the fire almost as often as Jake did, and delighted in spitefully messing with the killers she encountered. Dwight envied people like that. They terrified him, but he sometimes envied that sort of bravery that made people do crazy, wild things. Only sometimes. He still thought they were idiots. 

Dwight had to psyche himself up every time he stepped away from the guaranteed security the campfire afforded them. It was like touching a hot stove, knowing you’d get burned but hovering your hand over it anyway. Dwight knew he would get himself hurt if he left. He preferred the fire over any supposed freedom some of them got out of leaving it. He didn’t need to go for walks, or jogs, or adventures, he ran plenty in the trials and if he had to leave he preferred to leave with a group. 

“Aw bollocks…” 

Dwight looked up in time to see David beginning to flake away bit by bit, like paper being burned, fog gathering around them. He was being summoned to a trial. Under Adam’s arm Claudette was being pulled away too, and David bristled at the sight.

“EY! She’s had enough today! Leave her alone ya great wank!” He roared at the sky, incensed. Dwight realized at the last moment that he was being drawn in as well, too late to look around the campfire and surrounding woods to see who the fourth member of the group would be before his vision was engulfed in fog. 

Dwight was left floating in limbo for several moments, his vision grey. The fog was just cold enough to provoke a shiver out of him. His shirt wasn’t the best for this place. What he would have given to wear something like what Jake had. A scarf, a jacket, something warm and thick and protective. Or maybe something cozy, like a sweater, or a nice big hoodie. Not this flimsy, thin dress shirt. It felt damp within seconds in the fog, protected him from absolutely nothing, and it wasn’t even comfortable. 

The fog cleared and the first thing Dwight smelled was rust and dirt. The empty shell of a dilapidated car came into view in front of him. The wreckers’ yard. 

Looking around, he saw David not far away. “Find Claudette,” he whispered harshly, and Dwight nodded. 

They split up. Dwight kept himself low and quiet, knowing David’s louder tromping was bound to draw more attention, his head on a swivel. 

No bear traps. That was good. Dwight made it to the nearest generator without incident, getting to work right away. Not long after he’d started, he heard a scream. It wasn’t Claudette. David maybe? It was hard to tell sometimes. He’d probably made a beeline for the killer as soon as he spotted them, to try and draw their attention away from the others. Dwight had a bad feeling about this trial if that was the way David was going to play it. He wasn’t fast like Meg, he wasn’t made for running the killer around. He was loud, and he was tough, but he certainly wasn’t light on his feet. Sure enough, Dwight heard David go up on a hook nearby. He fumbled with a wire and the generator erupted in smoke, the resulting _bang_ echoing across the trial grounds.

“Shit,” he mumbled, abandoning the generator. He could feel his heartbeat beginning to pound in his ears already. Unlucky. The killer rounded a corner, long legs carrying them fast over the hard packed ground. Piercing white eyes landed on him immediately, set in an emotionless mask of paint and mud, head tilted in that curious way it had. The Wraith. 

Dwight ran. 

Somewhere behind him he felt David being loosed from the hook. One less thing to worry about for now, but the Wraith was still hot on his tail. Better him than Claudette right now maybe, but no less terrifying. 

Dwight didn’t handle terror well. He never had. Even now he could feel himself beginning to panic. He had to get away but he couldn’t seem to shake the Wraith off his trail. It was all he could do to keep from leading the killer right to his teammates, avoiding the generators he hoped to god they were hard at work on. 

Dwight vaulted through a gap in a wall, stumbled, and kept running. He was starting to whimper to himself in fear, because he knew he couldn’t keep this pace forever. The Wraith was steadily gaining on him. His chest was burning, his eyes stinging, every step just prolonging the horrible conclusion. Every instant of hesitation before he chose which way to run, every corner he turned a fraction too slow, every mistake he made would add up, allowing the killer to draw ever closer, unrelenting and inevitable. Before long, Dwight felt the sting of the Wraith’s scythe on his back. He gasped in shock, caught by surprise, and hit the ground hard. 

The pain came moments later, and that was when he screamed. The Wraith bent to collect him, catching him in the stomach with a hard shoulder as he was hoisted, making him cough. This was the inevitable conclusion, it always was. He was going to be hooked, but it was fine, he’d been hooked before, he was always okay afterwards. He could take it. He’d taken it before. 

Dwight told himself these things, and it never lessened the stabbing fear he felt just anticipating the agony he was about to experience. It never made the actual stabbing any easier. It was easier to be hurt if you didn’t see it coming, anticipation made the pain worse in Dwight’s experience. And by now, he felt it was safe to say he had more than enough experience with pain to be considered something of an expert. But it was impossible to fight the anticipation of the coming agony when he was thrown over a shoulder and walked through the trial grounds. Dwight knew where the hooks were and he knew when the pain would come.

The Wraith swung him into the hook in a smooth practiced motion that caught him in the shoulder, right beside the shoulder blade, underneath the collarbone, and he screamed with every fiber of his being. The weight of his own body dragged him down, the weight he carried every day suddenly impossibly heavy now that his feet had left the ground. It was all he could do just to cling to the hook, desperately trying to alleviate that pain, but without any sort of leverage or success. It burned, and distantly Dwight felt hot tears blurring his vision behind his glasses.

The Wraith didn’t stick around to watch Dwight dangle. He vanished with the toll of the bell almost immediately. Dwight didn’t manage to see which direction he might have gone, but that was so far from his mind now. Somewhere, another generator popped, and not long after that Dwight glimpsed movement creeping towards him, slow and careful. 

Claudette wrapped her arms around his waist and slid him off the hook, doing her best to catch him when he fell. She already had the gauze ready when he hit the ground, bandaging him with shaking hands. He managed a soft “thank you”, which always felt shallow compared to the overwhelming gratitude he felt whenever he was taken off a hook.

“Ace blew the generator on purpose,” she whispered, taking his sleeve and starting to guide him away. That answered who their fourth member was. 

“David’s trying to run the Wraith around this trial,” Dwight whispered back, drying his eyes. His glasses were filthy, a thin layer of grit and grime floating over everything he looked at. It was annoying, but there was never time to stop and clean during a trial. 

“I told him not to,” Claudette said, looking equal parts distraught and annoyed. 

Across the trial grounds, David went up on a hook again. Claudette pointed for Dwight to head to the nearest generator, she would save David. She had yet to go on a hook, or even be hit yet. David would be proud of himself for this, Dwight was sure. 

The trial went downhill from there. David was the first to be sacrificed, to no one’s surprise. He’d been sticking his neck out the entire trial, shouting and stomping, drawing all the attention he could. He’d done well running the killer around, but it hadn’t lasted long enough for them to get enough headway done. Ace had taken plenty of hits from the Wraith’s scythe, and Dwight wasn’t feeling too hot either. This trial was rough. They had two generators done, with very little progress on the ones remaining. 

Across the trial grounds, Dwight saw Ace go up on a hook, with that strange sight the entity gave them whenever they went into trials. The Wraith had taken him to the basement. Dwight mumbled a curse under his breath and abandoned his generator to go take him down, hopefully before Claudette got there. He knew how much she hated what they were doing now, trying to keep the Wraith off of her, but Dwight knew if he were in his position, there would be a tiny piece of himself deep down that was relieved, a piece he would have hated, but appreciated nonetheless. So he did his part keeping her safe, knowing full well that she would do the same for them. It was what kept their ragtag group together. Sharing supplies, protecting each other, paying things forward. Even loners like Jake, or Nea, or Min knew to support the team now and then. 

The basement though… that was the worst place to go during a trial. One way in, one way out, with hooks that burned when you were pierced by them. 

And he made it too late, Claudette was already lowering Ace from the meat hook and moving to treat the wound when Dwight came into view. He reached the bottom of the stairs just in time to see the Wraith bleed back into existence behind them with the sonorous tone of his bell, weapon held aloft, ready to strike. 

Ace moved just in time to take the blow from the Wraith’s scythe, catching the blade on his forearm with a cry of pain. With his uninjured hand he shoved Claudette away, ushering her past the Wraith as best he could. The Wraith spun, slashing wildly at her retreating back, catching her shoulder with a glancing blow that made her yelp. She stumbled, and the Wraith raised his arm again, readying another swing.

 _Don’t think,_ Dwight told himself as he ran forward, stepping between her and the Wraith. He shut his eyes tight and took a hit, falling to his knees with a scream. Hot blood soaked his sleeve where the blade had dug in, rushing fast. He was grabbed, hauled up onto a shoulder and walked the few strides the Wraith needed to put him up again, and Dwight wanted to sob, even though he knew later he’d be almost proud of what he’d done. He did it. He’d acted stupid, like David, and he did it. 

“Leave the kids alone!” Ace barked, bloodied and shaken, but trying to stand. He was next for the hook. Claudette hadn’t even had time to tie the gauze when the Wraith appeared. They were fucked this trial. It was a bad run. There wasn’t really a point trying to continue it, might as well give up and try again next time. 

“Go!” Dwight yelled, his voice nearly drowned out by Ace’s scream as he was pierced again on the same hook he’d been hung from just moments ago. “Find the hatch!” He saw Claudette’s guilt stricken face, streaked with sweat—and maybe tears—as she staggered backwards up the stairs towards freedom. The Wraith turned eerily slow, looking away from them towards the last remaining survivor, but he didn’t pursue her. Not immediately. He was waiting to see what Claudette would do.

With one final look, she turned and ran. The Wraith spared Dwight and Ace an unreadable glance before moving to follow her. His strides were slow and leisurely. He wasn't chasing hard. He’d won this trial and everyone knew it. 

“You did good, Dwight,” Ace said, his voice shaking. Dwight craned his neck to see where Ace hung. The man was smiling through the pain, his teeth bared in a grimace. Dwight could only nod in response. His hands and feet felt numb. The entity’s claws would take them back to the fire, and they'd know eventually what would happen to Claudette. It came for Dwight first.

“See you soon,” He heard Ace bite out, grunting with the effort to hold his own vicious talon at bay.

Death came pretty swiftly once his chest was pierced. Dwight preferred it over being mori’ed, honestly. He didn’t know what opinions the other survivors had. 

The heat of the fire was exquisite against his skin as he slowly appeared in front of it. The chilling fog cleared, and he saw hopeful faces watching his reemergence with uncharacteristic attention. They'd been waiting for him. 

“Jake’s back.” David was grinning far too much for a man who’d just spent a trial being treated like a punching bag. Something in the air had changed. There was a fire in the eyes Dwight saw staring back at him. Hope, maybe. Or something more dangerous. A call to action. “Wait til you hear what he saw,” David said. His knuckles were wrapped in gauze like they always were before he left the fire. Something was about to happen and Dwight wasn't sure he wanted to find out what it would be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, I don't plan on adding any sexual relationships to this fic, Meg's just bein' nasty out of spite. Nobody is blowing anybody, sorry folks. I am not above cracking jokes about it though.


	4. Chapter 4

Evan rarely slept long enough or deeply enough to dream. Oftentimes he couldn’t sleep at all, kept awake by the ever present stabbing pain in his shoulder or his arm, too agonized to move let alone work, and too agonized to truly rest. There were nights when no matter how he sat in his armchair he just couldn’t settle. 

He couldn’t lay down anymore. Not comfortably. The bed he used to call his own had gone unused for ages. He didn’t see the point in lying down on the one shoulder that tolerated it, constantly resisting the urge to turn over and bloody the filthy linens further. The hook in his shoulder made it nearly impossible to lay on his back without pushing it deeper, and he didn’t care much for sleeping on his stomach. Open cuts on his chest and stomach that never healed would ooze and bleed and burn. The bed was useless, and the only thing his old room was good for was storage space now. So he sat in the armchair by the fire, partly turned, leaning back against his left shoulder and dozing as pleasantly as he could get, perhaps even truly asleep at certain moments, but never dreaming.

But he was certain he was dreaming now, and of a sound he'd almost forgotten existed. The sound of someone knocking at a door. It was insistent and disruptive, dragging him slowly out of his doze. His eyes opened to darkness. The fire was nothing but a pile of glowing embers in the hearth, choking on ash, smothered by it, he barely even felt its heat anymore. And still, that noise persisted.

This wasn’t a dream. Someone really was at the front door. Evan couldn’t remember the last time someone had actually  _ knocked _ before. Surely never in this place. But here he was, well and truly awake now with no chance of falling back asleep, and the sound carried on. 

Moving hurt again. Just the act of sitting upright sent flashes of pain up and down his spine, and it was impossible to stretch away the discomfort with a hook in his back. It felt like his joints were each touched by globs of molten iron that sat heavy and hot on his bones. Movement of any kind shifted the metal embedded in his skin, but he had to get up. 

Biting back an involuntary snarl, he pushed himself from the armchair and fumbled for the mask he remembered leaving in his lap. He wrestled the cords over his skull, anger bubbling to the surface at being disturbed, caught off guard, asleep and unawares. Whoever was at that door was going to pay. He was already thinking about what sort of punishment this discretion warranted. He hadn’t settled on an idea just yet, he only knew that it would have to be brutal. 

His cleaver was embedded in a table by the door where he’d stuck it when he came in last. The edge of the aged wood was scored with countless grooves from repeatedly swinging the weapon into it as he walked by. He needed to build a new one soon, it was getting difficult to make the blade stick. A thought for another time, when he had the energy and patience for woodworking. He was thinking of murder now. Dropping their skull into a bear trap would be far too quick for this. Their death would be slow, he decided, wrenching the cleaver free as he passed, with just enough presence of mind to keep his footsteps soft as he approached the door. 

The knocking continued, and Evan’s fingers flexed. Whatever meat was behind that door would hear the sound of the locks turning if he went to unlatch it, and he was angry. He lifted a boot and kicked the door out. The locks broke with a crack and he heard a surprised yelp and the sound of footsteps scrambling as the door swung wildly outwards. They hadn’t been hit, a shame, but he’d startled them and that gave him a flash of satisfaction. He saw a pink shirt retreating from the house and frowned. 

The runner? Meat didn’t usually come back so soon after being cut down by his blade. He scanned his surroundings warily as he stepped down off the porch, following slowly. If she’d just been snooping and stealing, she wouldn’t have gotten his attention. This had been deliberate. 

She wasn’t moving as quick as he knew she could be. He could see her clearly, dipping quick and careful around his traps like she’d committed their current locations to memory. Every few yards she’d whip her head around and check behind herself, making sure she was still being followed the way she did when she ran him around in the trials. 

Evan scowled, feeling his scar pull against the expression. Something was going on. Something dangerous. She was leading him somewhere, playing bait again, luring him into the woods surrounding the estate. To the ironworks? The storehouse? Evan quickened his pace, familiar with the layout of the land and the arrangement of the traps set on it enough that he could reach her without much difficulty. Either he caught her before she reached wherever it was she meant to take him, or he stopped his pursuit entirely and decided upon a different approach. He was nothing if not persistent. And he was angry. He quickened his pace and watched her jump a little in alarm when she saw him coming for her, suddenly far closer than she’d expected him to be.

“Shit!” he heard her yelp, darting abruptly into the sparse shrubbery to her left as if that would somehow slow him down.

_ Snap _

A trap slammed shut, and Evan stared numbly down at his own foot, set squarely in the middle of a bear trap set where it wasn’t supposed to be. He hadn’t put a trap in those bushes, last he’d checked. The runner barked out a triumphant laugh as he realized what they’d done.

They’d moved his traps… They’d  _ moved _ his  _ traps _ .

Had it not been for his thick boots and the other precautions he’d taken to keep his own legs safe from the tools of his trade he would have been crippled by this unforgivable mistake. As it was, the only pain he felt came from the incredible pressure of the jaws clamped impossibly tight around his ankle. He hadn’t set this trap. Whoever had done it hadn’t secured the device to the ground properly and he would make them pay for it dearly. He growled in fury and wrenched his foot upwards, ripping the trap free of the dirt with ease, too angry to stoop and pry it open just yet, determined to prove their shoddy turnabout attempt was no match for what he could do, but that moment of distraction was what they’d been waiting for.

It was an ambush.

He heard them coming from behind, multiple sets of feet running fast and quiet over hard packed earth. He had just enough time to pivot sharply on his good foot before something hard connected with the side of his head. He raised his arms reflexively and felt a shoulder collide with his stomach. He narrowly avoided being toppled, driving an elbow into whoever it was that tried to bring him to the ground. There was lettering on the man’s back. Police. It was the police officer. But he wasn’t the one who struck first. No, that honor belonged to the brawler that was currently raising his fists for another swing.

Evan slashed at the police officer’s back, but most of his attention was fixed on the man who was coming for his head again. This wasn’t a trial, out here their attacks could hurt. Out here, the brawler was a threat. Evan shoved the police officer away with an audible snarl, trying to get some distance between himself and his assailants, stumbling slightly on the foot still stuck in his own bear trap. 

The Brawler closed the gap fast, moving like a practiced boxer, one arm launching towards Evan’s face, the other raised to block his own. His fist glanced off the edge of Evan’s mask, jostling it painfully, and Evan growled, stepping forward when the brawler moved away. It’d been a long time since he’d exchanged blows like this, but the muscle memory was still there and it was thrilling to fall back into that rhythm. It was different from the rush of a trial. This was real. Visceral. This was a  _ fight _ . He almost liked the man in that instant, for reminding him of this feeling, if he didn’t already hate him for what he was. Meat for the slaughter. A maggot trying to bring him down. Prey. 

Evan struck out hard with his empty fist, muscle and sinew pulling harshly where they were caught on the iron in his flesh. The skin of his knuckles split open on the brawler’s teeth and the man fell backwards from the force of the blow. No sooner had he gone down did the police officer move back in to take his place, already recovered from the hits he’d taken. 

This man didn’t fight with his fists. He darted closer, grappling with Evan’s right arm, immobilizing it with all his strength. He was wearing a thick, protective vest, and while it didn’t do much for him in trials, out here it was real defense, absorbing the brunt of the jabs Evan aimed at his side. He couldn’t swing his cleaver now, and like a bloated corpse being flipped, more maggots came crawling out of the woods around them. It was a proper infestation. 

Bodies collided with his back. They clung to his legs with reckless abandon, weighing him down, and he saw their aim clearly. They were seeking to overwhelm him with sheer numbers, and it was working. His balance was already compromised with the bear trap locked around his ankle, it wouldn’t be hard to bring him down now. He felt hands scrambling at his free arm and he threw an elbow backwards, hearing a grunt of pain as it found its mark. One body fell away and was immediately replaced by another. He was fighting a losing battle. 

Evan felt the exact moment that a hand wrapped around the hook in his back. They  _ wrenched _ it downwards, driving the buried point further into his flesh, and he  _ howled _ . The sound was ripped from him as the hook was pushed deeper. He couldn’t suppress the screams, they rose unbidden from deep in his chest, wrenched from his body with a violence befitting the agony suddenly driving him closer to madness. 

Sensing a weakness to exploit, more hands joined the first, seizing whatever iron they could find, malicious fingers reaching for the convenient handholds offered all throughout his body, and the fire that erupted in his veins was not one of rage, but of pain. There was no fighting back against this. 

The Entity was humming in the air, but it did not interfere. He couldn’t feel its displeasure, or its satisfaction. Whatever was happening now did not seem to concern it. Its attention was elsewhere. He was being left to fend for himself, and he was failing. 

The dark woods around him got even darker. Sweat was running down his back, or maybe it was blood, he could hardly feel it anymore. They just kept pulling and pulling and pulling, twisting and tearing, rending whatever flesh they found, now that they knew they could. His mask seemed to get deeper, his vision tunneling. He didn’t remember when he fell, but he remembered thinking that  _ this shouldn’t have happened _ . He was meant to kill them. Chosen to, made to, purpose built for the job. Would it consider this a failure? What was he meant to do? 

_ The maggots unionized, _ he thought, and he almost smiled.

The darkness engulfed him, and for a time he felt nothing at all.

* * *

The entity was buzzing in Evan’s skull when he came to. He could feel its power knitting him back together, but he couldn’t catalogue the damage. His head felt like it was going to split open and his body was wracked with pain. 

He was laying on his stomach with his face in the dirt, his mask digging awkwardly into his skin, but mercifully still in place. 

His right shoulder felt like it was on fire and he quickly understood why. His arms had been pulled behind his back and tied there. It strained the hook in his shoulder, bone grinding against iron hard enough to bring shameful tears to his eyes that he determinedly blinked away. He was surprised the hook even allowed his arm to be pulled back that far. Whatever they'd used to restrain him was soft. Gauze, probably, because where would they have ever gotten rope? He wasn't sure he'd be able to break it. Not right now, not with the pain.

There was movement and voices around him, whispering and shuffling, a laugh. He couldn’t hear what was being said, their voices were too soft. 

A shoe connected roughly with the side of his head, shunting it to the side. It wasn’t a full kick, but it threatened to be. The insult of it woke him faster than the pain, a hot flash of anger bringing the world back into sharper clarity. Though his mask had shifted ever so slightly from its usual spot, Evan could see the legs of the meat he hunted surrounding him. Too many to bother recognizing beyond that point. It wouldn't do him any good putting terrified faces to the sets of footwear he could see. 

They knew something had changed, he could hear it in the whispers they exchanged with one another. However his breathing had been before, he was sure it was different now. Louder, more pained. He couldn’t stop it. He'd already forgone the chance to feign unconsciousness just waking up in the first place. Each breath he took came as a shuddering wheeze that caught in his throat with every involuntary spasm of pain, and every twitch of hyperextended muscle tissue. 

“Is he awake?” someone whispered with an appropriate amount of caution. 

The shoe returned to nudge his mask and Evan jerked his head away with a snarl. His earlier screaming certainly hadn’t done his throat any favors, but it was to his benefit when the sound he made was almost more animal than man. He was angry. Furious. And he was unable to act upon it. 

The meat collectively flinched at this evidence of consciousness. 

“Yeah, he’s awake,” came a faintly accented drawl, the speaker’s shoes crossing in front of his vision. The brawler was scowling down at him with blood on his teeth and a lip that was starting to swell, pacing back and forth agitatedly. “If you  _ things _ can talk, I suggest you do,” he said, ejecting a mouthful of pink spit into the dirt, perilously close to Evan’s face. Evan hoped he’d cracked one of the man’s teeth on his fist. He hoped it had hurt. 

His legs were free—not from the bear trap, they’d left that on his ankle—but they were unrestrained. He was still debating whether to make that their problem when someone crouched where he could see them. The boy with glasses. Beside him stood the saboteur, observing him with an unreadable expression, and the runner boasting a far more triumphant smirk. She had his cleaver, and was holding it casually at her side like a trophy. He’d kill her first when he got free, he decided. Wipe that insufferable grin off her face. He preferred wide eyed terror. 

He hated this. It had been too long since he’d been made to sit in silence while impotent rage burned a hole in his chest. He used to be better at it, maybe. There used to be a time when he was made to bite his tongue, clench his jaw, and breathe and breathe and breathe until the world stopped looking so red. He’d been better at it then. 

He just wanted to kill them now. And he didn’t want to repress that urge. 

He kicked out wildly with his good leg, sending a spiteful cascade of leaves and forest detritus in their direction.

He needed to be quick, not his strongest suit. Without hesitation he rolled onto his better shoulder, clenching his jaw hard to keep from voicing the pain that the movement caused. It was difficult, and agonizing, but he got his legs under himself enough to sit up and try to stand, dragging that damn bear trap across the ground as he did. But he was too slow, a hand on the hook in his back brought his progress to a grinding halt, pulling him back to the ground like he was some mongrel they’d leashed. 

Evan swallowed his shout of pain and tried to tamp down the fury that was boiling directly under his skin now. It wasn’t a tool he could use anymore, but that didn’t stop his stomach from churning, his fists clenching behind his back. He tested the gauze’s integrity, and got another yank on the hook for it. 

“Don’t,” a man said lowly in warning. It made Evan snarl, but it wasn’t enough to stop him from doing it again. The maggots had learned. They were going to be insufferable now, but resistance wasn’t worth the torture they promised. Not at the moment. So he sat, he fumed, but he complied, not bothering to look to see whoever it was that had a hold on his achilles heel. His head was swimming from the pain anyway, and he knew his various wounds had reopened and were bleeding anew. He could feel the hot leak of blood running down his skin all over his body, but it was hardly an unfamiliar feeling. He had more pressing matters to concern himself with at the moment.

There were faces missing from the group's number, he saw that now that he was sitting upright. They hadn’t come at their fullest strength, perhaps separated by ongoing trials, perhaps separated by cowardice. It was still startling to see so many of them in one place. He was accustomed to seeing only four at a time. He'd never bothered to count the faces he usually saw in the entity's current line up, but seeing an approximation of their number was compelling, to say the least. He didn’t care enough to pick out the ones who were currently absent from their group, aside from one of the ones he’d killed recently, the woman with an affinity for digging in the dirt. He couldn’t see her from where he sat. 

“You can understand us, can’t you?” the boy with glasses asked, sounding sure of the answer, but wanting some sort of confirmation anyway. Evan didn’t owe them that, he didn’t owe them anything, certainly not his cooperation, but he nodded anyway, and saw the surprise and trepidation spread throughout the group like a wave. The pressure on the hook abated slightly.

“Can you talk?” he was asked next. 

“Even if you can’t, we’re going to talk, and this time you’re going to listen,” the runner told him with a self satisfied grin that made him want to beat her skull to a pulp with the hilt of his cleaver until he couldn’t recognize its features. Thinking about it made him feel slightly better, but not by much. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard his own voice, but he still remembered how to use it. And there were many things he would have liked to say at that moment. Things that would probably provoke an attack. It was difficult, but he bit back those words. He pieced together something civil and pragmatic, and tried to infuse as much malice as he could into his tone as he mustered his long disused voice into working order. 

“What are your terms?” Evan bit out in a growl at last. Each word was dredged up from whatever depths in his soul he typically locked them away in, but he’d used them. He wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of  _ making _ him talk. And there was something satisfying in the way their expressions shifted from anticipation to surprise. Their shock was almost palpable. He saw dropped jaws, and stupid, dumbstruck expressions, and he was pleased by it.

“Terms?” The boy with glasses seemed taken aback.

Evan saw where this was leading. They wanted something. Maybe revenge for all the blood he’d spilled, but if that had been their aim they would have been crueler to him by now. They knew what cruelty looked like, they’d seen it, they’d been on the receiving end of it countless times over. They’d stripped him of some dignity, and he’d make them suffer for it soon enough, but he was hardly crushed.    


“We want to be able to walk around here without getting killed.” The boy with glasses said finally, picking up the fumbled thread quickly.

“Or trapped,” another added pointedly with a meaningful nod towards Evan's own feet and a sardonic grin. He was an older man with dark glasses over his eyes. Evan knew him. He remembered drawing him once, and getting frustrated when the glint of light reflecting off those glasses hadn't come out quite right. He'd burned that page, and in the next trial he'd had with the man, he'd hit him hard enough to knock those deceitful glasses clean off his head. The man hadn't been grinning then. 

“No.” Evan wouldn’t allow any room for compromise on this. He knew they’d ask for something unacceptable. Free reign over his land was something he could never tolerate. 

“No?” the runner repeated, affronted. 

“There’s tons of crap in here that’s  _ meant _ for us to find!” Someone new spoke up next. A gaunt woman with a wool hat and scraggly black hair that grew long on one side. She liked to snoop. He'd caught her defacing his property often enough to hate her viciously for it. Behind her stood another woman. He knew her too. She was the one that had figured out how to fight back in the trials. She'd stabbed him more times than he cared to remember, and not for the first time he wondered what she'd done for the entity to grant her a gift like that. One bloodied hand gripped something sharp, and she looked like she'd very much like to use it again. 

“If it’s on my property, it’s mine,” he growled, seething. He would not be cowed into obedience. He'd suffered worse than anything they could do to him. He was confident in this. He had to be. 

“You arrogant prick, you’re hardly in a spot to be talkin’ like that,” the brawler snapped. He hadn’t stopped pacing since Evan had woken up, and it was getting irritating now. 

“He’s never gonna agree to anything. There’s nothing stopping us from taking what we need now, we should just go,” the brawler added, and that made Evan tense. He rose to his knees with a snarl that tore through his already ragged throat, and felt the hand on his hook try to haul him back. It hurt, and he bled, but he pulled against it anyway. They couldn't be allowed to do that. He wouldn't let them. He'd fight that with every fiber of his being. 

Evan got one foot under himself, the one he could still plant firmly—his other foot had long since gone completely numb in the bear trap’s jaws—and that made the meat antsy. He saw the lot of them shrink back, flinching away in fear, and he growled again, wrenching his wrists against the gauze that bound them together. 

The boy with the glasses stumbled to his feet but didn’t bolt. Instead he raised his hands in a bid for calm, trying to settle the rising ire in his group.

“No, no, we’re not doing that. We will if we have to, but not if you’re willing to negotiate,” he said quickly, desperately. Trying to placate him. “We’re trying to change things.”

Keeping threats on the table was smart of them. Evan had no doubt their grudges ran plenty deep enough to pay him back for the pain he'd dealt. It went without saying what he could expect if he refused to cooperate. But they were being softer than he would have been. He kept leaning forward, despite the pain of the hook pulling him back. Fresh blood flowed down his back, cooling on his skin, but he ignored it. 

“We need the supplies,” the boy with the glasses said. 

“Trade then.” Evan spat the word like a curse. It tasted the same as any foul word he could have expelled in its place. Pain gave his words an additional edge that he didn’t bother trying to soften. He was leaning his weight from the hook and he was sure the one grabbing it was digging their heels into the dirt to counter him. 

“We already tried that with you! Now that we beat you you’re going to listen?” the runner snapped. “You didn’t want any of the shit we tried to give you before, and we needed it anyway, what are we supposed to trade?!” She argued, and while that was true, they’d been bartering for a life, not a trinket or a service. If they’d been smarter, they would have offered one of themselves. Not that he would have listened then either, but it was common sense. A handful of rubbish just wasn't worth sparing a life. But Evan didn’t have the composure to point out that particular detail to them now. 

“What else do you have?” He asked instead, impatient and willing to let it show. 

He didn’t expect much. They couldn’t trade what they needed from him. The medical supplies, the electric torches, the keys… all the useless things the entity dumped on his land to lure the maggots in during their time outside the trials. 

Evan saw them exchange looks, and his curiosity was piqued. He was certain they crawled into the spaces that belonged to the others too, certain they found things that they didn’t use in trials. Things Evan didn’t have, but might want, once he knew they were out there. 

"We have water? Fresh water.” A canteen was rattled at him. He heard liquid sloshing inside. Tempting. 

“Claudette can make food and things sometimes. With the plants she finds.” Intriguing.

“Paper.”

Evan narrowed his eyes at the saboteur. The boy was watching him. His eyes were sharp.

“Deal.”


	5. Chapter 5

Meg sat by the fire, turning the Trapper’s cleaver over in her lap. She’d been struck down by its blade plenty of times, but this was the first time she had the opportunity to actually inspect it without the threat of immediate disembowelment. 

It still didn't feel real, what'd they'd done.

The Trapper fought like a beast. The sound of his screams hadn't sounded human... It wasn't until Laurie grabbed that hook sticking out of his back that they actually started to make any sort of progress. And when he finally went down, they didn’t trust what they’d seen. It had seemed too easy. They’d thought it was a trick until Tapp had bent down to check, and then once he wrestled the cleaver out of the Trapper’s bloody clenched fist and tossed it out of reach, they realized what had happened. They’d actually beaten him. They’d _won_ a fight against a killer. Meg had picked up the weapon while Tapp bound his wrists, and she’d been caught off guard by its weight when she lifted it. The Trapper swung it around so easily, and she could barely hold it out at an arm’s length without trembling from the effort it took to keep the blade aloft. 

It was as long as her arm. The grip was wrapped in leather, worn and shaped by fingers far larger than hers, and the blade, although uneven and jagged, was sharp. Dried blood flaked off the handle and left rusty stains on her hands when she held it, and she wondered how much of it was hers. She’d been killed by it recently. It could be her blood. And that was a strange feeling to have, looking down at the red on her hands and thinking about how it came from a wound she’d had. A wound that killed her. 

It was still a cool trophy to have, she supposed. 

David told her that the Trapper had another weapon now, which was horribly unfair. He hadn’t even gone one trial without a blade. And the new one wasn’t much different from the one Meg was holding, according to David. He'd gotten a very generous look at the new cleaver in his last trial, when the Trapper mori’ed him. 

The Trapper certainly knew how to hold a grudge. He was letting them bleed longer. Making them crawl further. Waiting by the hooks until the entity took them. Even his mori's felt different. He seemed to have memorized which of them he'd seen when they'd beaten him, and now he was enacting his revenge, one trial at a time, and Meg was still waiting for her turn. He was such a sore loser. 

Meg tore her eyes off of the blade laid across her legs and looked across the fire to where Kate sat, strumming softly on her guitar. A little music did wonders on their collective morale in this hellscape. Sometimes when she got tired, or sick of performing, she’d pass the guitar to Jeff and he’d give them a few songs, but Jeff wasn't here. Quentin sat beside her, staring at the flames and looking dead to the world for all he reacted to what went on around him. Every now and then Kate would nudge him with her foot and he’d jerk and nod reassuringly. 

Beyond them, deeper in the trees, Claudette sat among her garden. A ramshackle little fence made out of sticks tied with gauze enclosed the area. It gave the space a cozy feel, like this was a home, a place they’d genuinely settled rather than the spot the entity dumped them in when it got bored with torturing them. Meg only recognized a few of the plants Claudette grew, but Claudette knew them all by heart. She made cute little signs to label each section and spent her free time poking around them, seeing what could be harvested, monitoring the growth, inspecting the soil… gardener things, Meg assumed. 

Beyond the firelight others loitered in the woods. Ace was playing cards with David and Min. Nea was scribbling something on a scrap of paper—a graffiti tag she wanted to put up sometime, if she found the means to do so. Her art never stayed up long. Either the killers got rid of it or the entity did, either way her work was never permanent, but she kept putting it up at great personal risk, and Meg loved it. Nearby, Adam was resting with his back against the trunk of a tree, dozing. Laurie was somewhere, sharpening her stabbers on whatever she could find, probably. She had quite the collection now of shivs to take into trials. Shards of broken glass, pieces of wood, metal spikes. Anything with a point was taken into consideration. They couldn’t afford to be picky. 

The woods around the campfire used to be empty, back when it was just the four of them. Dwight, Claudette, Jake, and her. God, things had been scary then. Jake was almost never around, always off in the woods, avoiding them. Took ages for any of them to even learn his name. Meg had run off in the first direction she’d hoped would take her back home, and she’d just ended up back at the fire. Over and over and over again. By the time she gave up, Dwight and Claudette were already trying their best to settle in. Maybe someone would see the fire and come rescue them. Maybe people were already out looking for them. But nobody ever did come by to save them. New people came, but nobody left. So, after a while, they started to actually make an _effort_ regarding the place they now “lived”, if anyone called it living. And, truth be told, Meg was actually kind of proud of what they had now.

Curtains were hung from branches and stretched between trees for privacy wherever it felt needed, dividing the space, allotting everyone a little nook in case anyone needed a spot to just get away from the others. It was sheets stolen from hospital beds mostly. The hospitals were dangerous territories to scavenge, but they were rich with a seemingly never ending supply of amenities. And anything that looked worth taking, they took. 

They spent a lot of their time here building little pockets of comfort wherever they could get away with it. Sure, it kind of looked like a dump, but to Meg and the others it almost made the space livable. And it was nice to have something to be proud of here. 

Jake and Dwight were crouched nearby, just beyond the fire’s warmth. They were sorting the things they were going to trade, now that trading was going to be a thing. Everyone had tried to pitch in something. Bottles of water taken from the pond they sometimes found out in the woods. The makeshift tea bags Claudette made from scraps of fabric painstakingly cleaned and tied with bits of string and filled with even more painstakingly prepared tea leaves from what plants she’d been able to grow that could be made into tea. It was hard to bake the leaves correctly over a campfire, and with virtually no baking implements at all, but Claudette knew more about the process than Meg did. 

They also had papers, scavenged from the Doctor’s territory mostly, documents so faded they’d reverted back into blank pages. There was always paper in that place, but the risk they took to get them wasn’t always worth it. Jake had insisted upon it this time. He knew something they didn’t, and whatever it was he wasn’t sharing.

They hadn’t snuck back into the Trapper’s territory since they’d beaten him. And that had been… six trials ago, maybe? Meg wasn’t good at keeping count. But they were going back now. Dwight, Jake, Tapp, and herself. Tapp was just going because he was worried about them, he said. He was sweet like that. And Dwight was going because Jake said he had to. Meg was going because she was curious and she wasn't going to let anyone tell her to stay at the campfire. 

She watched Jake carefully stow a portion of the collected items into the center of a ragged blanket too filthy and threadbare to be tolerated as anything more than a haphazard curtain. Now though, its purpose was as a sack to carry “the goods”. Jake pulled the corners together and checked to ensure nothing would slip out, nodding decisively to himself. They were just about ready to go.

Meg leaned the unwieldy cleaver against the log she sat on and stood with a sigh as the others approached. 

“You’re not bringing it?” Tapp asked, nodding at the blade, and she snorted.

“I’m not going to give that asshole a chance to take it back. We just got it.” It wasn’t like any of them were capable of using it against him anyway. David or Jeff or Tapp could probably swing it more easily than she could, but against the Trapper it was still no contest. They were better off just ganging up on the guy, like before. And they’d do it again if this visit went poorly. Which it still might.

“Might piss him off too much if I brought it anyway,” Meg added after a moment of thought.

That was why David wasn’t coming. He couldn’t trust himself not to try and piss off the Trapper, he’d said. They were supposed to be on their “best behavior” for this, which was bullshit because it was the Trapper they couldn’t trust. He could easily snap and start killing them again as soon as they walked out of the woods, they couldn’t trust him _not_ to. But here they were, going anyway. 

Jake took the lead, like he always did. He knew the fog and the forest best out of all of them, guiding them along the outskirts of other killers’ turfs, eyes and ears always peeled, on constant guard. Meg walked faster than he did though, and it was hard to remember that she was meant to be following him. She usually just ran wherever the fog took her, and tried to pay attention to whose territory she skirted when she did. Traveling somewhere intentionally was a different matter entirely, and no one ever truly mastered it, but Jake was the one who’d gotten the closest. 

“Think we’re gonna get killed on sight?” She asked, looking up at Tapp with a grin after they’d been walking for a while and the oppressive silence had started to irritate her. 

“No. But I’m worried it might happen anyway,” Tapp said levelly. 

“If that happens, we know we can beat him now,” Dwight said with absolutely zero confidence.

“You really think it’d work a second time?” Meg asked, because someone had to. She doubted the Trapper would fall for the same trick twice. She was actually worried about that, now that she said it aloud. If he did just go back to killing them before they even made any progress, would they be able to stop him again? Sure, if it’s always as easy as grabbing that hook in his back and giving it a good tug, maybe it wouldn’t be a problem, but would he let them get close enough to do it again? 

“Shhh,” Jake hissed, coming to an abrupt halt and motioning for silence. The bluish gloom of the Trapper’s territory was bleeding through the trees ahead of them as the fog began to fade. They were here. Meg could smell smoke on the air, and hear the distant ring of metal being beaten. 

Without a word, Jake passed the sack of goods to Dwight and gestured for them to stay put. Meg dropped to a crouch with a huff and watched the others follow suit. Jake was sneaking ahead to scout things out, like a gentleman. 

He wasn’t gone long, thank god. Before Dwight could get worried enough to persuade them to go after him, Jake had returned, looking slightly less perturbed. 

“Watch your feet,” he whispered, beckoning them forward. It was the warning they always gave each other before they entered the Trapper's territory. A reminder to not get caught. The hammering carried on unbothered and there was only one person it could be really. 

His back was to them, moonlight gleaming off of the hook in his back. In one perpetually red fist was a hammer. He brought it down on the head of a tall iron stake, again and again and again, driving it into the dirt with impeccable aim, never once fumbling a strike. There were more of them, Meg saw next, each standing at least three feet high, four feet apart, arranged in a wide circle around a recently cleared patch of earth. Bushes had been uprooted and grass had been torn away. The tops of each stake were forged into a ring, like he meant to affix something to them at some point. 

He was building a fence. 

Tapp strode past Jake, putting the rest of the group behind him, and that made Meg smile despite herself. 

He cleared his throat as they drew closer and the Trapper paused, hammer raised over the iron stake, muscles tensed, coiled energy waiting to be unleashed. He lowered his arm and turned around eerily slow. He hadn’t jumped at the interruption, or given any indication of being startled by their sudden arrival, but there was no way he heard them coming with the racket he’d been making and he didn’t relax once he saw them. His grip on the hammer shifted, and suddenly it was no longer a tool but a weapon in his hand. But he didn’t use it. Just watched them through those dark pinholes in his mask, waiting, his free hand coming to a rest almost casually atop the metal stake he’d been hammering into the ground.

His breathing was labored, shoulders rising and falling steadily, but it was nowhere near as strained as it had been the last time Meg saw him. He’d been downright wheezing then, running his lungs ragged. He’d barely sounded human. Seeing him now, without the threat of immediate death hovering over her head, Meg still wasn’t sure he was entirely human. Maybe it was the mask. Maybe it was the way the rest of him looked. 

Silently, the Trapper pointed at them, and then jabbed a finger towards the ground at their feet. 

_Stay_.

Meg scowled at his mangled shoulders as he turned and strode away without so much as a word, towards the buildings looming in the distance. Back to the silent treatment and already giving orders? And after he’d been so chatty the last time they’d seen him too. She was almost tempted to follow him out of spite alone, but her feet stayed rooted in the dirt. As she watched, the Trapper stepped seamlessly over a bear trap set in plain sight with only the slightest change in stride. He had no problem walking through the minefield he created.

“Guess we’re safe for now,” Tapp murmured, watching him go. 

Dwight let loose a shaky sigh of relief and lowered the sheet-turned-sack slowly to the ground, unraveling it carefully. He busied himself with lining up all the things they’d brought to disguise how nervous he was, and Jake took a knee beside him, adding his hands to the mix. He whispered something soft at Dwight’s shoulder, but Meg wasn’t paying attention to them. Her eyes were on the surrounding fog drifting lazily through the Trapper’s territory. They weren’t safe out here. They never were. This shaky truce wouldn’t change that. 

"Please behave," Tapp told her under his breath.

"Hey, if I really piss him off, maybe he isn't as dedicated to this new trading thing as we'd hoped," Meg whispered back decisively. "Think of it like a test."

"I'd rather not."

Meg heard the Trapper’s boots and his thunderous breathing as he returned and they all fell silent. The sound of his approach made her stomach lurch towards the woods behind them, and she hated the way she had to lock her knees to keep from bolting. The reaction was carved deep into her brain. Even without the throbbing heartbeat that heralded his presence during a trial, she had to actively force herself to stay put, the gut instinct to run was so strong. 

She saw him soon enough, striding out of the murky blue of his territory. A leather bag was strung over one shoulder, almost identical to what he sometimes carried with him in trials, the one often stuffed with extra bear traps. Under his other arm he carried something far bulkier. Was that… a table? Holy shit it was a table. Why did he have a table?

The Trapper stopped at the edge of the clearing he’d made and planted the table firmly between them. It wasn’t that big. Maybe three feet long and a foot and a half deep. The edge of the wood was worn so badly that it sloped inwards, scored with deep straight cuts like he’d been using it as a chopping block of some sort. Next, he dropped the bag from his shoulder, lifting the strap deliberately over a bolt of metal in his arm before it could snag. 

“Still sore?” Meg asked impulsively. Tapp shot her a sharp warning look that she decided to ignore as the Trapper’s mask snapped towards her. "I used to think those things were just for decoration," she continued, nodding at his shoulder.

The Trapper’s fists clenched, and a low noise nagged at the edge of her hearing. A growl rumbling at an impressively low decibel. Other than that he didn’t move. Whatever expression he might have worn was completely obscured, she couldn’t even see what his mouth was doing through that toothy gap in the mask, but she thought it was safe to assume that he was pissed. 

“We brought water, tea, and papers, like we promised,” Dwight cut in quickly, gesturing to the array of goods in front of him. The Trapper’s mask turned slowly to him.

Silently, he loosened the drawstring of the bag he carried and Meg heard something clank from inside it as he dug through its contents. He’d brought things too. Holy shit, this was really happening wasn’t it? 

Nobody spoke much after that. Apparently this wasn't something that required words. Not to the Trapper. 

He could hold a surprising number of rolls of gauze in one hand, Meg observed. He must have been stockpiling to have so many at once, and he was probably hiding more. The amount he was offering could supply a medkit for lots of trials, and it’d be plenty useful outside of trials too. The gauze was set on the table, and the Trapper reached back into the bag for more.

A map was placed beside the gauze, followed by a flashlight, a handful of batteries, and finally a single black key. He had more to offer than they did, Meg observed privately. And it was all things that would make the trials harder for him. She wondered if that made him seethe. If he hated giving them things they could use against him. She wondered if he’d snap if she asked him about it. 

The Trapper was always easy to piss off. He had these rules that no one knew about, lines only he could see, and they were everywhere, so it was very easy to cross them. Meg did it all the time, mostly on purpose. Breaking traps like Jake did always ticked him off. So did walking around what he considered his “property”. Escaping made him mad too. Honestly, anything that wasn’t what benefited _him_ could set him off, and that made things easy.

This? All this bullshit they were tiptoeing around now? This was hard. There was no script for this. She couldn’t fill the blank spaces with snide remarks and insults like she usually did. He had a limit somewhere, she was sure of that, but she had no idea where it was, and that was new. She didn’t like not knowing where that limit was. 

So she watched them work. Watched the Trapper point sharply to what he wanted, and parcel out what he determined to be its worth. He undersold a lot of their shit, but didn’t argue when Dwight or Tapp made their case. 

The water was easy for them to get. They just needed to find the pond and refill the bottles they’d already scavenged. So long as they didn’t need to sneak into any of the killers’ territories for new bottles, they could collect it without even the risk of being horrifically murdered. So it was “cheap”. 

Some rolls of gauze were tossed their way, and next the Trapper withdrew a massive canteen from the depths of the leather bag and tossed it to Dwight without much of a warning. Dwight fumbled to catch it, yelping with surprise. The clang it made against Dwight’s hands sounded empty. 

Trapper had thought ahead and brought something of his own to carry the water. Dwight refilled it with shaking fingers and the canteen was tossed back. Meg watched curiously as the Trapper hefted it, judging its weight, unscrewing the lid to check inside and make sure he wasn’t being swindled. It made Meg roll her eyes. As if _they_ were the untrustworthy ones here. 

The tea was by far the most time consuming thing to make that they’d brought. Sometimes Claudette would start on a batch and get pulled into a trial partway through, so everyone had gotten used to being called on to step in and watch the leaves while she was gone. Meg enjoyed helping tie the little bags, it was like a fun little craft project. She hated the idea that they were going to share this special hard earned comfort with one of the things that made this place unbearable. He didn’t deserve it. 

The Trapper didn’t ask what the tea was, and maybe he didn’t care. He didn’t linger on it when it was tossed to him, and the map was passed across the table to them in exchange. Finally, he pointed at the last item they’d brought. The papers. 

Jake shuffled forward and silently thumbed through the pages, slowly and deliberately showing the Trapper how many they’d brought. The item Jake had specifically insisted they bring. The Trapper raised the key, and after some near silent deliberation amongst their group, Jake nodded. 

It was actually almost… fair. Which was weird. And suspicious. It wasn’t supposed to be easy, nothing in this place was ever easy. He wasn’t even talking. Just jabbing a bloody finger at what he wanted, acting like he couldn’t speak even though they all knew by now that he _could_. It was a conscious decision he made, choosing not to speak, and it pissed her off, watching him pretend.

He wanted to kill them. He’d been doing it since they’d come here, he was doing it now, and he’d keep doing it, trial or no trial. She didn’t need a sixth sense to tell her that he was _fuming_ at being forced to cooperate with them. She didn’t even have to _know_ him to know that. He'd been making his feelings on the matter perfectly clear in what trials he'd had with them since they'd kicked his ass. But he was restraining himself now. 

Finally, as Dwight was putting away their bartered goods, the Trapper spoke. 

“We meet here.” He pointed to where they stood, at the clearing he’d made, encircled by the unfinished fence. “If I catch you somewhere else? I’ll kill you.” 

His voice hadn’t improved since the last time Meg had heard it. Horrible, low, rougher than any voice she’d ever heard before. It rumbled like an oncoming train, or distant thunder. Deep, but in a painful way. There was nothing smooth about it.

He didn’t turn to leave. No, he was going to watch them leave first, like he didn't trust them not to linger, and they got that message fast. 

It felt odd, leaving a killer’s territory with the killer staring right at them. No running, no chasing.

He was still standing there, watching them, when Meg peered back over her shoulder to take one last look before the fog welcomed them back into its chilly embrace. She scowled, sticking her middle finger to him, and she hoped he saw it. 

They weren’t greeted with much fanfare when they made it back to the campfire unscathed. Kate was gone, but her guitar sat against the log where she’d been sitting last. Must be in a trial, Meg assumed. 

The Trapper’s cleaver was where Meg left it, just as bloody and horrible as always, like it was moments away from being picked up and buried in someone’s neck, as though it carried with it the same terrible aura that its owner exuded. Maybe she should put it away somewhere, out of sight, so no one had to look at it.

“Welcome back,” Ace said, sparing them a glance from his game of solitaire. Tapp let out a gusty sigh Meg suspected he’d been holding in for a while now, and moved to sit across from him. 

“Wanna play a game?” He asked wearily, gesturing hopefully to the cards, and Ace chuckled softly and gathered the deck, shuffling it with an unnecessary amount of flair Meg knew he did just to impress people. 

The shit they’d traded for got put into a communal pile. They tended to share most of the things they found. Sure, everyone squirreled away things for themselves every now and then, and that was fine, but most of it got put in the same spot for people to pick through when they needed something. Dwight didn’t waste time, he set to work immediately organizing everything. Meg didn’t really understand his system, but it made things easier to find so nobody bothered trying to change it. Everything was grouped and arranged nice and neat. 

“Thought for sure he was going to kill you guys,” Nea drawled, looking like she’d just returned from her own eventful outing. Her shirt was damp and there were snowflakes caught in her hair and resting atop her beanie, slowly melting. She strode past them all and pulled a sheet down from a tree to wrap around herself, shivering. “Went to throw a tag up on one of the hospitals. The Doctor’s gonna be so pissed,” she said, grinning viciously. 

Meg grinned back. It wasn’t every day someone pulled one over on the Doctor. 

People returned from their trials, Meg tucked that awful cleaver away, and things were slow for a while. Blessedly so. But it didn’t last. It never did. Before long, Meg looked down at herself and saw the fog beginning to surround her. 

She moved reflexively towards the pile of collected crap that made the trials less crappy and hesitated for only a moment before deciding what she wanted to bring with her. 

She made her choice just in time. Seconds later, the fog consumed her vision and for several moments she was lost in it, cast adrift as the Entity shuffled the world and deposited her wherever it wanted. The acrid scent of ash assaulted her nose as a familiar twisted forest came into view, one she’d seen far too recently to be a coincidence, and she narrowed her eyes at the figure staring back at her from across the trial grounds. 

The Trapper stood in full view, his new cleaver clenched tightly in one bloodied fist. It really didn’t look that different from the old one. 

She raised the key they’d just bartered from him, and she could see his grip tighten on the handle of his weapon even from a distance. He took a powerful, deliberate step towards her and she bolted. 

The chase was on. 


End file.
